Splash Learn is a digital education platform that converts math and reading practice into game-based activities for children in pre-K through grade 5. The service blends curriculum-aligned lessons with interactive play, adapting difficulty to each child’s progress. As of April 2026, the platform reports more than 40 million users and over 500,000 educators across schools and households worldwide. What Is Splash Learn and How Does It Work? Splash Learn began as a math-focused tool and has ...

The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go directly to the Kickstarter . Read more on the Blog . The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go ...

Flink added support for what it calls Materialized Tables in 1.20 , released in 2024. You can read about the design and motivations in FLIP-435 . In a nutshell, Materialized Tables provide a way to include the SQL to populate and refresh a table as part of its definition. Flink added support for what it calls Materialized Tables in 1.20 , released in 2024. You can read about the design and motivations in FLIP-435 . In a nutshell, Materialized Tables provide a way to include th...

Let’s explore explore our Moon and its archival boon of Earth’s midnight and afternoon Let’s return return to the gray blemishes for its scientific promises and its technological wishes Let’s also preserve preserve Luna’s natural dents its phases and cultural crescents and the serene sights Selene presents Let’s not screw up not screw up our cosmic Moon nor blow up its geologic tune by letting exploitation balloon It’s way too soon too soon to have no Lune in our star-wiped ski...

I used to have this thought that optimizations in compilers and databases were a bit of a bandaid to badly-written code or something. I think this is not a correct mental model, though. I've also been trying to learn more about compilers recently, just because I have query planning problems that I feel like must have already been solved by the compiler world. So here's some musing. Languages like Rust benefit from compiler optimizations much more aggressively than other low-ish-level languag...

Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we spend years chasing nanoseconds that nobody asked us to chase. Five years ago, I started this blog by building a microsecond-accurate NTP server with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS . Then I went simpler – a $12 USB GPS for millisecond-accurate NTP because ease of use matters too. Then I spent months doing thermal management on the CPU to squeeze out another 81% improvement. My beloved Raspberry Pi 3B has been sitting at around +/- 200 nanoseco...

After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 is finally here. That means it’s also time for another Asahi progress report! Automate Everything Users of alternate distros and keen-eyed individuals may have noticed some changes to the Asahi Installer. After almost two years, we finally got around to pushing an updated version of the installer to the CDN! Two years is a long time to go between updates, so what took so long? After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 i...

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Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code . This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates with the better advice I’ve seen out there, so the article makes a good overview of the state of using AI for software development. I wrote the previous version of this post in March 2025, updated it once in August, and it has been linked ...

“The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can.” ― The Lord of the Rings Milford Sound is not only the most famous tourist spot in New Zealand, but also one of the world's top travel destinations, attracting up to 1 million visitors per year. It's often referred to as the 8th World Wonder. With such a reputation, my expectations were high. Despite its name, Milford Sound is actually a fjord rather th...

I love a good synchronicity! I was literally just talking about the Commodore 64 longboard I bought locally, and how much fun it’s been restoring, testing, and building it into my Aldi 64 shell , not to mention comparing it with my 64C shortboard. Now we have some news that I’m frankly giddy about. Peri Fractic and his relaunched Commodore team has just announced an Utimate Commodore 64C , and it even uses the same moulds as the original! It will come in RGB and Gold versions like the...

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was . Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard...

We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the array. We sometimes call this algorithm a linear search. In C++, you can get the desired effect with the std::find function. For large arrays, you can do better with a binary search. Binary search is a classic algorithm that efficiently locates a target value in a sorted array by repeatedly dividing the search inter...

For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft's commercial IP rights to OpenAI's technology would be null and void. That clause appeared to end today. I decided to try and track its expression over time on openai.com . OpenAI, July 22nd 2019 in Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI (emphasis mine): OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI techn...

If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem 1 had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers. That design meant that the cellular modem fu...

This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry, so replacements came slowly. With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work, namely M-x calc with stackcalc and Elfeed w...

Who knows that you blog? by David Jamieson David talks about his reluctance to share details about his blog with a colleague, and asks whether other people with blogs tell their friends and family. Read post ➡ I saw this post in my RSS reader this morning, followed by a reply from Alex , so I thought I'd add my own opinion to the mix. I'm similar to David and Alex - I'm not forthcoming with the fact that I have a blog, but I don't hide it either. I think that's mainly because most of my fri...

My favorite quote about networking came from Jim Kurose. The Internet works so well because it doesn't have to. The IP and lower layers of the internet stack make no promises of delivery. Complete failure fulfills the protocol. This allows for simpler and more powerful protocols without the extra complexity needed to guarantee success. TCP aims for delivery basically by restarting the IP communication when it fails, and even TCP can report failure to the layers above. We can say the same a...

Coding agents and reasoning models let individuals consume many more LLM tokens than they could a year ago. It’s now easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars in daily token usage. This is being actively encouraged through the recent memetic spread of “Tokenmaxxing” – the idea that if you consume more tokens, you’re more “AI native” and therefore producing more valuable output. Tokenmaxxing is not The Way. Plainly, it’s a textbook instance of Goodharting. Token ...

Every argument about internet regulation eventually turns into an argument about free speech and pornography. Unsurprisingly, the topic isn’t frequently discussed in undergraduate computer science classes or books on software engineering; I don’t have anything new to add, but here are a few things I’ve learned over the years. Every new form of media has gone through the same regulatory cycle with respect to pornography: initial criminalization, selective and often corrupt enforcement, an...

Respect your users and their confidence in you, “Microsoft” GitHub. Ethkuil , Updates to your GitHub Feed #65343 After years of waffling around I finally bit the bullet and migrated away from GitHub onto Codeberg and a private Forgejo instance. If Codeberg is good enough for Gentoo then it’s good enough for me. What’s the problem with GitHub? One part of my GitHub aversion is me being anti the big American tech corporations for ideological reasons. I’d lik...

Introducing the compute unit- a modular and customizable desktop enclosure for small computers like the Latte Panda IOTA and the Raspberry Pi 5. I increasingly look to smaller and lighter compute platforms as the core of my lab infrastructure gets more refined. Sure, it's great to have a small datacenter at your disposal, but dealing with power, heat, and noise are really pretty terrible if they're in your living space. I always look at fanless or water cooled options since they tend to be far...

Ultra Robotics’ OP1, which mounts a humanoid-ish robot to a larger robot arm, via Jon Schwartz on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran This week in Strait of Hormuz...